We’ve worn dozens of smartwatches and fitness trackers over the course of workdays, workouts, vacations, and the rest of everyday life to see which ones best track your activity, relay your phone notifications, give you access to apps, and do anything else that lets you keep your phone in your pocket. The Apple Watch Series 1 (which works only with iPhones) offers the best combination of style, message handling, apps, battery life, activity tracking, and value. But we also have picks if you use an Android phone, or if you value fitness or distance-sports tracking over style, notifications, and apps.
Google announced in late August a substantial new version of Wear OS, which should roll out to nearly every smartwatch running Android Wear 2.0 as of September 2018. The biggest changes are to the navigation of Wear OS’s homescreen, which means it could make these watches significantly easier to use. The updated UI will give you four primary places to go from your watch face: Swiping left gets you to the new Google Fit and its Heart Points and Move Minutes; swiping right brings you to a hopefully fast-loading, better-responding Google Assistant interface for asking questions or issuing commands; swipe up and you’ll see a long stream of all of your notifications, which you can interact with and respond to; swipe down, as with Wear 2.0, to access quick settings. Google told Engadget that the update focuses on reducing loading times and improving Assistant responsiveness, which addresses some of our major our misgivings about Wear OS. We’ll test this latest Wear OS and update this guide after we have a better sense of the changes.
When it comes to smartwatches, one size most definitely does not fit all. The best option for you depends on a number of factors, including the smartphone you use; whether you want strong activity-tracking features; your budget; and your aesthetic tastes. For example, many people prefer a smartwatch with a round display because it looks more like a standard wristwatch than a piece of tech. You'll want to take all these factors into consideration when you begin the search for the best smartwatch for you. So whether you’re looking for something appropriate for dinner parties or back-country trails, high-end, budget or something in between, we’ve tracked down the best smartwatches on the market this year.

The three buttons on the Q Explorist are useful and responsive, although the middle crown’s button action may be a bit too responsive. The newest versions of Wear OS allow you to set each of the two clicky side buttons (at the 2 and 4 o’clock positions) as a shortcut to any function on the watch when on the home screen. Clicking the center button wakes up the watch and brings you back to your “home” watch-face display, and holding it down activates Google Assistant. The Q Explorist’s center button has a mushier action to it than the Digital Crown on the Apple Watch, and its rotation is stiffer (more on that below), but it works, and turning a crown is easier to do in more situations than continually flicking upward on a touchscreen. The Venture lacks the two side buttons, and its crown cannot turn through lists. While the turning crown is a helpful upgrade, the the Venture’s push-button response is firmer and better than on the Explorist, and its screen response is fast enough to make the lack of physical input tolerable.

We loved Samsung’s characteristic bezel navigation. Instead of having to swipe your finger across the touchscreen repeatedly, all you have to do is gently twist the bezel. It’s a much smoother way of scrolling through your list and it just feels more natural. The are other side buttons which lie almost flush with the side of the watch, making it difficult for them to catch on sleeves.

The RC-1000 Wrist Terminal was the first Seiko model to interface with a computer, and was released in 1984.[10] It was developed by Seiko Epson and was powered by a computer on a chip.[12] It was compatible with most of the popular PCs of that time, including Apple II, II+ and IIe, the Commodore 64, IBM PC, NEC 8201, Tandy Color Computer, Model 1000, 1200, 2000 and TRS-80 Model I, III, 4 and 4p. The RC-20 Wrist Computer was released in 1985, under the joint brand name "Seiko Epson".[13][14] It had a SMC84C00 8-bit Z-80 microprocessor; 8 KB of ROM and 2 KB of RAM. It had applications for scheduling, memos, and world time and a four-function calculator app. The dot-matrix LCD displayed 42×32 pixels, and more importantly, was touch-sensitive. Like the RC-1000, it could be connected to a personal computer, in this case through a proprietary cable. It was also notable in that it could be programmed, although its small display and limited storage severely limited application development.[10] The RC-4000 PC Data graph also released in 1985, was dubbed the "world's smallest computer terminal".[10] It had 2 KB of storage. The RC-4500 (1985), also known as the Wrist Mac, had the same features as the RC-4000, but came in a variety of bright, flashy colors.
Software may include digital maps, schedulers and personal organizers, calculators, and various kinds of watch faces. The watch may communicate with external devices such as sensors, wireless headsets, or a heads-up display. Like other computers, a smartwatch may collect information from internal or external sensors and it may control, or retrieve data from, other instruments or computers. It may support wireless technologies like Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and GPS. For many purposes, a "watch computer" serves as a front end for a remote system such as a smartphone, communicating with the smartphone using various wireless technologies. Smartwatches are advancing, especially their design, battery capacity, and health-related applications.[5]
Wear OS comes with a focus on fitness features, but unfortunately Huawei managed to simultaneously move too far in this direction and also fall short of it. It doesn’t come with a rotating side button for navigation, which is a shame as we really love the button on the LG Watch Sport. It does, however, come with great battery life and a stellar feature set otherwise.

Fitbit Versa: The Fitbit is the health tracker for the masses and they have a model for every need. But the best option for adults who do a moderate amount of exercise and just want to keep tabs on their general fitness (ie: most of us), the Fitbit Versa is a great choice. It's an entry-level smartwatch. For more on the Fitbit Versa’s various attributes, read my in-depth review. ($350)

The Apple Watch Series 3 is a really nice smartwatch that does exactly what it should. This is easily one of the best smartwatches on the market. It’ll give you quick access to notifications, allow you to pay with your wrist, give you turn-by-turn directions, and it’s a decent fitness tracker. In terms of design, it doesn’t feel like Apple cut too many corners with the overall look and feel of the device. Even the Sport model (the cheapest one of the bunch) feels like a well-built piece of hardware.

Fossil’s Q Explorist and its smaller-wrist counterpart the Q Venture are well-made, responsive, fashionable Wear OS smartwatches that offer a lot of color and band options, making them the best option around. They ably run Wear OS (more on the pros and cons of Wear OS itself in a bit) and convey your phone’s notifications to your wrist. Their buttons engage with clean clicks, the Explorist’s center crown moves through lists and notifications much more effectively than swiping, and both screens are responsive and clear.
The Apple Watch Series 4 is now on sale, and it's the best smartwatch you can buy right now. The redesigned device, which starts at $399 for the GPS model and $499 for the cellular version, is the best smartwatch you can buy. It has a larger display and slightly bigger case size while retaining the same rounded square design the watch is known for. Even more importantly, Apple received FDA clearance for a new electrocardiogram feature that can take a 30-second EKG and diagnose atrial fibrillation.